Csupi Turned 97 Today

In “Fatherland,” my aunt serves as a divine narrator, guiding me when I can’t find the way.

Are such beings truly divine? In the Greek myths, the gods and goddesses seem more like cartoonish humans: They get wasted; they sleep with the wrong people. They’re petty and vengeful. So what do I make of Csupi, who escaped the paranoiac prison of Socialist Hungary only to find that life on the outside was even more complicated?

I don’t believe I’ll ever forget the time she unreeled—unprompted, the words tumbling out in a waterfall—the story of her harrowing escape in the winter of ’56, the failed revolution a sharp and bitter aftertaste. Running miles through deep snow, panting and exhausted, collapsing in exhaustion, only making it to her feet with the help of a stranger who refused to give up on her.

Eventually, she landed in Vienna: A place of freedom, culture, romance. Csupi had a taste for nightlife, allowing herself to be courted by numerous suitors, drawn by her sharp wit and her fierce intelligence.

And let’s face it: My aunt was kind of a fox.

But when she told her roommate about the man she was falling for, the woman blanched: “Csupi, don’t you know he’s the son of Vienna’s most prominent Nazi?” My aunt broke off the relationship. But something else haunted her in Vienna: The knowledge of what she’d left behind.

You’ll have to wait for that story. Like nearly everything about my aunt, it doesn’t make loving her—or hating her—any easier.

How is she today? Not well. I just got off the phone with her. She can barely hear my voice, she says, and she’s lonely. She tells me she’s waiting for death.

Even accounting for her dramatic streak, it makes my heart heavy. Because for all her legendary cattiness—not to mention the flat-out racism—I know a little of what she endured, what she gave up in exchange for her freedom. It doesn’t excuse or even explain her behavior. But it deepens the mystery that is my aunt, and my very human family.